Introduction

Arguments
presented and decisions rendered in court cases often illuminate, open,
and sometimes close frontiers in social history. For example, the arguments
presented in school desegregation cases of the early 1950s illustrate
how the "separate but equal" doctrine presented in the Plessy v.
Ferguson decision of 1896 virtually closed the civil rights frontier
for nearly 60 years. Conversely, the decisions rendered in the desegregation
cases opened up that frontier and encouraged the expansion of the civil
rights movement in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Background

In April 1951, the students at Robert Russa Moton High School in Prince
Edward County, VA, went on strike. Although their protest was intended
to persuade their local school board to build them a better school, it
actually led to a landmark civil rights case that marked the end of segregation
in the nation's public schools.

Moton High was typical of the all-black schools in the central Virginia
county. It was built in 1939 to hold half as many students as it did by
the early 1950s; its teachers were paid substantially less than teachers
at the all-white high school; and it had no gymnasium, cafeteria, or auditorium
with fixed seats like the nearby white Farmville High had. Repeated attempts
made by Moton's principal and PTA to convince the school board to erect
a new black high school were fruitless. So, in the spring of 1951, the
students, led by 16 year-old Barbara Johns, took matters into their own
hands. They went on strike and asked for help from the NAACP's special
counsel for the Southeastern region of the United States.

The NAACP lawyers told the striking students that the only way the organization
could commit to getting involved in the students' cause was to sue for
the end of segregation itself. This was a huge step beyond the students'
goal of obtaining a new school building! After thinking it over very carefully
and gathering the support of their parents, the students agreed to challenge
segregation directly. On May 23, 1951, a NAACP lawyer, on behalf of 117
Moton students and their parents, filed suit in the federal district court
in Richmond. The first plaintiff listed was Dorothy E. Davis, a 14-year
old ninth grader; the case was titled Dorothy E. Davis, et al.versusCounty School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia.
It asked that the state law requiring segregated schools in Virginia be
struck down.

In the spring of 1952, a three-judge U.S. District Court decided in favor
of the school board and upheld segregation. On appeal, the case made it
to the Supreme Court of the United States and was decided along with three
other school segregation cases from South Carolina, Delaware, and Kansas,
in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

The Brown decision marked the end of the "separate but equal" precedent
set nearly 60 years earlier in Plessy v. Ferguson. The court
stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,"
and that school segregation violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Commonwealth of Virginia, and Prince Edward County in particular,
resisted the Supreme Court's decision. The county closed its public schools
from 1959 to 1964 to avoid desegregation.

Note: This article originally appeared in
the 2001 National History Day
Teachers' Guide: Frontiers in History: People Places, Ideas.